smoke people.

Ivy-vine curtains hung from the overpass to shield them, and swallows' nests decorated the cement wall with honeycombs of mud. The sun was rising behind them, turning the narrow stream of water into a shining snail trail through the brush. Rio Seco. Last night, they'd parked the truck on a street near here and walked. From this cave under the freeway, they'd watched campfires like orange blooms in the black stretch of trees, seen shadow people walking on the paths, carrying water jugs and bundles, pushing shopping carts.

Elvia's body ached, her hip crushed into the leaves and sand and concrete under the freeway roar. I'm here, somewhere near Yukon Avenue and the linen plant on Bellgrave Street. If my mother's here, she doesn't even know I'm coming, so she can't run. My dad said, "If somebody found me, and I didn't want to be with them, I'd just book up again." But I'm the one that booked. I left him. Maybe I should have told him about the baby, taken my chances.

Michael jerked awake and rubbed his palms over his temples, smoothing the hair that had escaped his braid. "Caveman's stayin down there. He'll pay me a hundred bucks for the medicine." He pointed to the riverbed. The September heat was burning wild oats and foxtails brown. "See the green?" Michael said, moving his finger. "Only thing still living by fall."

Dark vines looked like floating islands in the dry flats, some with yellow balls scattered among the leaves, some with white flowers. Fall, she thought. I've been gone for ten days. Michael said, "The yellow balls are bitter gourd, for washing your hair. The white flowers wash your brain."

"Why does this guy want it?"

Michael raised his brows. "He loves Indian shit. Says he's part Cherokee. Like everybody says. But he's always got speed. He wants to mix it with dreaming medicine, make something new he can sell for big dinero." He slid down the embankment to the path.

Elvia heard coughing from the cane, and saw a thin plume of smoke. "I'm starving."

"Eating for . . ." Michael frowned, cigarette smoke curling from his mouth. The baby was already trouble to him. He didn't care about food-he wanted speed. He didn't want to be only half high. She looked up at the freeway sign. Razor wire was curled around it like a slinky, and plastic bags clung to the barbs in tattered shreds, like ancient Christmas tinsel.

She slid down just as a bearded man burst from the cane and walked the other way. Elvia's heart thudded with fear, and she felt the circle of a nub-foot again, faster, insistent.

The mist clung to the bamboo like a thousand tiny breaths. Michael nodded at the black water sliding past in the cement channel. "My grandpa and his cousins dug all the canal ditches back in 1910 or something. This canal waters all the groves from Dos Arroyos to Agua Dulce."

Two brown men wearing baseball caps, carrying plastic water jugs, passed them on the trail. Hector said something to them, receiving a blank look. "Guatemalans," he said. "No espanol."

Elvia thought, Everyone's here-Guatemalans and Mexicans and us. Dogs barked at an opening in the brush. Michael said, "They only attack if you head down to their people."

"Lotta people down here, carnal," Hector said. "You sure you know where we're goin?"

Michael nodded. "More camps than I ever seen. But I remember the place."

A shopping cart nosed out from another tunnel, and Elvia stared at a woman who looked like Callie. The woman glared back and called, "The fuck you want, wetback?"

Hector laughed at Elvia, then shrugged. "Just like Mecca."

Michael bent to study a large white stone near another narrow path. "Let's go," he said, and they plunged into the cane. The smell of wet sand underfoot, and pee somewhere, stung her eyes. Michael peered at another white stone. Elvia saw tiny letters marked like graffiti.

"Cool. He's still here," Michael said. "By the big tree." He whistled, and then pushed through the dangling branches of a huge eucalyptus.

Elvia bent to look at the painted letters. H. 8. And a red heart.

Caveman sat in a bamboo chair that hung from a tree branch. Elvia thought he looked nineteen or twenty. He had light brown hair, sideburns, a curly beard like Velcro, and pale blue eyes, like plastic turquoise. He said, "Hey! My man Torres. You're out already? You make the magic potion yet?"

"Man, I just got out. You got the magic powder?"

Caveman frowned at Elvia and Hector, and Michael said, "They're cool." Caveman went inside a plywood shack and came out holding a Christmas cookie tin, his hands white and soft as biscuits from a can. Callie always said you could tell a person from their hands, but all Elvia could tell was that he ruled this place, with his painted sign on every tree. H-8-Red. Hatred.

"So she's cool," Caveman said. "Whoever she is."

"Elvia," Michael said.

Caveman grinned. "You named after Elvis?" he asked her.

She looked straight at him. He sure as hell wasn't Dually. "My dad's not an Elvis type."

"Her dad's pretty scary," Michael said casually.

"So where is he?"

"In Florida," she said coolly. "Where's yours?"

"At home, I guess." A girl came from his shack, her broad forehead pink, her lips closed in a little smile. "Tina Marie must be headed to the facilities," he said.

"Check it out, cause you can't go alone," Michael told Elvia. "Coyotes and wild pigs that weigh like three hundred pounds and have tusks." Elvia looked at Tina Marie's face, placid as a plastic baby doll's, her eyes wide open. "The guys from the other camps-that's what's most dangerous, okay? I can always hear you, wherever you are."

In the bamboo-sheltered place near the small stream, Elvia steadied herself against the tree. She waited a long time for Tina Marie, who stayed behind another tree. When Tina Marie came out, she threw back her head and stared at the sun, as if she wanted to be blind. "Hey," Elvia said. "Don't do that. You'll mess up your eyes."

Tina lowered her face, and her pupils were black pinpricks. Now Elvia could see that her forehead shimmered with small dents, like beaten metal, and the back of her neck was shiny with stripes of scarred skin. Elvia couldn't imagine what had caused them. But Tina Marie reminded her of kids at the foster homes who weren't really in the room-their selves were gone, with only their bodies left behind.

Walking back, Elvia saw a slash of blood on Tina Marie's bare leg. She said, "Here," handing her a tissue-thin cottonwood leaf, and Tina Marie wiped her leg, still silent.

Elvia sat next to Michael under a eucalyptus tree, tucking her stiff, sore legs under her. "Let me do it, man," Michael told Caveman. "I gotta have tobacco in mine. I don't like the pipe, man, it goes straight to my forehead and not like, all around my skull. It's different for Indians."

"What's the Indian word for speed?" Caveman asked.

Michael crushed the white clots and sprinkled them into cigarette paper. Then he added tobacco from a pouch. "My people didn't smoke speed way back then," he said.

"They smoked plants like the one you're gonna get for us?" Caveman persisted.

"Yeah. Sometimes they smoked that one." Michael glanced at Elvia; he wanted her to notice. Indian stuff. That's what Caveman wanted to hear. Chanting and painting faces and mystical dreaming secrets. She hadn't been much different herself when she first met him. Would he tell Caveman the same stories he'd told her?

They drew the smoke deep into their lungs. Their faces were blank and alien while they held their breath, eyes unfocused, like her father, like Callie and Dually. Elvia passed the cigarette without smoking, holding it away from herself. Caveman got his voice back first.

"What's wrong with you?" he said. "That's the quicker picker-upper. I got it from the best."

"I don't smoke." She gave Michael a hard look. She didn't want him telling these people anything about the baby.

"Why?" Caveman's voice was like a fist. "Your scary dad's a cop?"

Elvia said, "That's pretty funny."

Michael took another draw, the ember going purple, but Hector passed, too. "I remember you from St. Jude's," Caveman said to Hector. "You better not be a fuckin narc."

Michael said harshly, "He's my brother." Then he began to cut down tall, straight sticks of arrowweed with Elvia's knife, weaving the wood together with grapevine. When he was finished, she lay on the sand in the gold-striped light coming through the branches. The pepper tree's fragrant berries made her think of meat, but tweakers didn't eat for hours. From the doorway, she saw Tina Marie's face glimmering with sweat. Like she has a fever, Elvia thought, wishing she could touch the girl's forehead and know what was wrong. Like Sandy could.

Hector pulled Elvia up and said, "Let's go to 7-Eleven and get you some food. And Camels for mano." Elvia was dizzy, but she checked her pocket for a quarter.

Sandy said, "Hello?"

The blood rushed to her ears. "It's me."

"Where are you? I was so worried."

"Everything's cool," Elvia said quickly. Through the receiver she heard clinking dishes. "What did you do all day?" Her voice came out wrong.

"What do you mean?" Sandy said slowly.

Elvia closed her eyes, seeing the sink, the moon in the window. "I just wanted to know."

Sandy must have heard it. What she wanted to see. "I vacuumed. I washed colored clothes and sheets and towels and hung them outside. It always cheers me up to see them hanging there like clowns jumping around in the wind."

"How come you have so much laundry?" Elvia held the receiver hard.

Sandy paused. "I had a kid who wet the bed a few days."

Elvia felt the hot rush of something in her chest. Jealousy? How could she be jealous of another foster kid? A little one? She remembered the social worker taking her from house to house. She brushed the velvet scrunchie she wore on her wrist, wondering if the little girl was being driven from front door to front door right now. "You don't want a fuck-up teenager. You like them little." She was sobbing like the night she left Sandy's, riding with the window open, rushing through the desert valley, seeing her own green eyes in the side mirror. "Then they go away. And you never have to see them when they're big fuck-ups." She gulped for air. "What church is it? The one where she left me."

"Elvia-"

"You have it in my papers somewhere." Elvia kept her voice hard.

"Saint Catherine's. On Palm Avenue." Sandy sounded like she might cry, too. "Tell me where you are. I'll come get you. Right now."

"Everything's fine here." Elvia swallowed hard. Sandy cried over everyone. Everyone. She'll be fine, as soon as she gets another kid. One that'll be happy to sit in her lap and listen to stories. A little kid. Not a big one, getting bigger, messing up every day.

"I have to go," she said, and hung up as Hector handed her a small red box.

"Raisins?" she said, wiping her eyes. "You trying to remind me of Mecca?"

"You're supposed to eat iron when you're pregnant. I looked at the vitamins in there, but, man-they're five dollars a bottle. Raisins have iron. You call your dad?"

"My foster mom." She twisted the raisins in her teeth. "Where are we?"

"Over there's Agua Dulce." He pointed to pastel houses on a hillside. "This is no man's land. Lemon and orange groves all along the canal. That's why we used to come here." He touched the raisin box-Sun-Maid, with a beautiful olive-skinned woman and a basket of green grapes. "Those grapes are up in Dinuba. Where my moms went. Hey, I'll draw you a rock map. Where'd you get that blue one?"

She reached into her pocket, where she thought she'd put the glass gems, but she had only the brown and green ones left. "Damn," she said. "I lost the blue one." She felt her eyes fill up again. "I got it when I was a kid. Here in Rio Seco."

"Hey. Michael's gonna keep sketching higher and higher. You need to watchate." Hector smoothed his hair off his forehead, looking tired. He said, "I did speed a few times to stay awake for work. I smoked mota in summer sometimes. But I can feel it on my brain. Like fog on a window. I never do anything during school." He nodded at her belly. "And you can't either."

Elvia said, "I know." Michael was good at dreams. But Hector was good at the rest of life.

"I'm just saying, if you find your mom or not, I'll kick it with you like a friend. Mi palabra."

"What's that?"

"My promise. If you learn some Spanish." He grinned.

She almost asked him to come with her-maybe he could talk to her mother, if she didn't speak English. But no-Hector wouldn't know cus. And if her mother was awful, she didn't want anyone else to see.

"I'll meet you back there," she said.

The truck's blunt-nosed grill was cool under her fingers. Dust and wet made rivulets down the windshield when she started the engine. She drove through Agua Dulce, where roosters stalked the yards of pink and yellow houses. Mercado Aparecida-where women carried out plastic bags of groceries and sleeping babies. Carniceria Reyes-where women studied slabs of beef in the windows. She stared at the animated faces of some gathered near jewelry glittering in the window of Joyeria Alvarez.

Serafina Estrella Mendez. What did she look like? Everyone had braids, black eyes, and brown faces. Everyone was a mother. She turned a corner so fast she felt a sudden, squirming shove, like a dolphin was caught behind her navel. Not a kick, but a roll. Leave me alone! I don't want to think about you right now. Go to sleep. She heard the ragged sound of her own thoughts, desperate and impatient as Callie and Lee, as the foster mothers' words raining down on the restless limbs of all the kids where she'd shared beds and couches and carpet.

Bellgrave Avenue was a wide street lined with warehouses and blank-faced buildings. Linwood Transmissions. Beacon Electronics. Women gathered in parking lots, black hair in buns and hair nets. Then Elvia saw the sign: two hands cradling a stack of cloth. Angeles Linen.

The low, blue building had windows completely blind with steam. If her mother was illegal, how could Elvia go inside and ask? As if someone would say, "Oh, yeah, she's right there."

She drove to the back. This is where he had found her. She hovered in the open back door, smelling the steam, a wet smoke of bleach and cloth, clouds of white rolling out into the sun.

Pushing herself into the vapor, she studied the brown faces under round caps like blue clouds themselves, rising from the women's heads. Their hands flew across shirts and sheets and towels, turning smoothing patting curling and then sliding under stacks of linen to disappear when they lifted the pile. Twenty, thirty faces, all those hands, the rumbling of huge dryers and women reaching into the gaping mouths, pulling out mounds of cloth that hid their faces.

In Mecca, bandannas hid their faces. Elvia had become Mexican within minutes, Hector joked. Invisible and sweating and moving her hands.

I'll never find her.

Under the thunder of dryers, they were talking. She tried to see past the wreaths of steam. Someone slapped down a load of sheets, and someone else pointed at her. Sharp-boned faces closed like night flowers. She looked for a face like her own, and an older woman with gray wires of hair escaping her cap called to her in Spanish.

"Serafina Mendez?" Elvia called, as loud as she could. "Mi madre? Serafina Mendez?"

"No," said the older woman. She added something in rapid Spanish, and the other women began shaking their heads, their hands resting for a moment like sparrows on the white sheets.

A big delivery truck pulled in, and someone said, "What the hell are you doing back here? Move it." An older man with blue eyes and a Santa Claus beard waved her away.

She kept her mind empty while she drove toward the western foothills. Yukon Street-a little dead-end road. Don't expect anything. Just see the place. She passed Vancouver, then Calgary. Men were gathered on one corner, intently watching passing cars. When they saw the old truck slow down at the corner, they jostled around her door. "Trabajo? Trabajo? Five dollars, okay?" Elvia shook her head and they fell away, turning to the next vehicle. She peered at the signs. A woman with long braids tied together at her waist sold boiled corn from a cart on a corner.

The next street was Yukon. Something Elvia had done, that night, on this sad-looking little street, had made her mother lose it. Everything in her body thumped and pulsed now-her chest, her head, her belly, even her fingertips on the wheel. At the curb marked 2510, she stared at two tiny brown cottages, the dusty hedge along the chainlink fence, the green paddles of cactus, the corn and peppers growing on one side, and irises and roses on the other.

But she remembered nothing except the sound of beans clicking in a bowl, the smells of corn and lime and cinnamon, the pale grins of her mother's heels when she left a room and Elvia sat on the floor waiting for her to come right back.

When she knocked at the corn house, a child inside called, "Mami, mami!" A woman with a braid peered from the screen without opening it. "Si?" she said.

Elvia swallowed, trying to recall her school Spanish. "Hola. Yo, yo soy Elvia. Serafina Mendez, es aqui? Is Sara here? I am her daughter." She tried not to choke on tears.

The woman shook her head and spoke rapidly in Spanish. She saw that Elvia understood nothing, and she added, "No here. Nobody." The little boy beside her touched the screen.

Of course nobody's here. Without thinking, she knocked at the other door. 2512. Fingers curled at the curtain edges, she thought, and she heard faint singing inside, like a radio. She smelled something nutty. Like oatmeal. But no matter how many times she knocked, no one came to that door.

She parked the truck in the street and walked numbly toward the river. She couldn't stand to try Saint Catherine's yet. What for? It was Tuesday. Who would be there? Who would remember anything about a Nova twelve years ago?

This was the only place to go home to, for now. Walking down the tunnel worn by people pushing through the arundo cane, she heard something crashing to the ground, loud as gunshots. Caveman and Tina Marie, with three other boys and a new girl, were looking toward the sky.

Michael was at the top of a palm tree, dancing around the trunk. He slammed a machete blade above him, and three fronds fell, rocking down through the air, landing on the dirt with the rest, scattered like golden lion tails.

Elvia squinted up at him, and Michael laughed, sliding down the trunk, leaping the last six feet to collapse beside her. "Caveman's friend had a chete. Been workin palm trees since I was ten. We'd go down to the flats and trim a whole street. Make some dinero."